My Name Is Jody Williams. Jody Williams
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as a salesman for General Electric and would cover a three-state area. This meant he'd be traveling all week, leaving the house early Monday mornings and not getting back home again until late Friday evenings. While it was a huge economic relief that Dad finally had a job, my mother felt completely abandoned while trying to cope with four kids in an alien town, with no friends or support network. My father had to take their only car, which left her feeling further trapped. Mom was angry at my father and envious at the same time. He'd get to hop in the car and drive off for five days of peace and quiet while she struggled to manage everything alone.
If I'd been in my father's position, I'd have been thrilled to drive away from that distressed, chaotic house. If I'd been in my mother's shoes, I would have been a raging maniac. Mom didn't have the energy to rage. Instead she descended into a profound clinical depression, where she lingered for about a year. It was a no-win situation.
Dad couldn't stop working, so he hired a woman to stay with us while he was gone. Mrs. Day must have been competent enough and not unpleasant, because I have no bad memories of her. I think of her in shades of gray. The rest of life around that time is sepia colored. If my mother emerged from her bedroom at all, I don't remember it. The only clear memory I have of her from that year is watching her sleep when Dad would let me tiptoe into the room to look at her and make sure she was still there.
I don't know how my mother pulled herself back from her abyss. She had no antidepressants, and they couldn't afford counseling. Even if they could have, at that point in my parent's lives, help of that kind, outside the family, would have been out of the question. Probably her acute depression just ran its course as most do, helped along by the fact that, for my mother's sanity and the sake of the family, my father stopped working for General Electric.
Dad found a job in town with a local vending company that provided food machines for factories in town and at some of the ski lodges around Mount Snow. They also had jukeboxes and pinball games. A few years later, my father bought the business, which he owned for the next three decades.
As far as I could see, he wasn't around all that much more than when he'd been a traveling salesman. Along with his full-time work with Brattleboro Vending Corporation, Dad held a variety of part-time jobs on the side. He sold used cars; and he sold mobile homes, which we were never supposed to call trailers but did anyway. Just to poke fun, which he didn't find funny at all.
My father was an insurance investigator once and, later, a bartender. At one point he owned his own bar, until my mother told him it was the bar or her. There were too many late nights there, after he'd worked all day, and too many women interested in hanging around the handsome bartender.
Dad's long workdays weren't only a result of our puritanical New England work ethic; he cobbled jobs together to make ends meet. He was gone by the time we got up for school, and he often worked late into the night. But he was always home for the family dinner at 5:30 every night.
Only recently has my mother finally recognized that what she lived through was acute clinical depression. Curiously, despite the move to Brattleboro and its terrible impact on my mom, I've always considered her to be the rock of stability in the family. I was never one of the kids who hid things from her. To the contrary, there were many times throughout my life she wished I wouldn't share my adventures with her. Sometimes when I'd start to tell her something she didn't want to hear, she'd stick her fingers in her ears and start humming. I'd just wait her out. I always wanted her to know the entire me, not just the good parts.
Mom was always deeply embarrassed about her nervous breakdown, even though no one seemed to resent her for it, covertly or openly. It wasn't until we were young adults that we could try joking with her about it. Sometimes she could laugh, but usually she'd end up describing all of the factors that had contributed to the breakdown—as if we hadn't lived them ourselves.
And even though having four young kids was part of what had crushed her ability to cope, it was just on the other side of her depression that she became pregnant with Janet, who was born about six months before I turned nine. We all think getting pregnant again helped bring her back. She was totally excited. We moved to a bigger and nicer apartment just up the street, where there'd be more room for the baby. And when Janet arrived, we were all overjoyed. A new sister. Mom was happy again, finally. Dad smiled because Mom was smiling. We didn't know it was a brief interlude, and that not too long after Janet was born, Steve would begin his long descent into insanity.
· · ·
When we moved to Brattleboro, I started going to Green Street School. It was just down the hill from the rented apartment where we lived. Despite my being a good student, school was sometimes an anxiety-provoking proposition. Like so many kids, I never felt I was smart enough, and I worried about it all the time. I fretted about the possibility of bad grades, but more than that I worried about looking stupid. Fourth grade arithmetic with Miss Larkin (although my friend Judy insists it was Miss Lawrence not Miss Larkin) was especially torturous. When it came to memorizing the multiplication tables, I was bound in knots of misery. We'd work on them in class, study them at home, and work on them more in class.
Miss Larkin's favored technique was to randomly call on students to stand up and recite whichever table she dictated: “Wally, recite the 7s table for us.” Or “Joyce, the 9s table.” The lucky ones got the 2s or 3s. She'd stand at the front of the class, stout and gray-haired, peering at her victims through steel-rimmed eyeglasses.
Most would try to avoid her eyes, hoping she'd call on someone else. Sooner or later Miss Larkin would get to everyone, and you'd be the one standing up—a deer in the headlights of her piercing eyes. How I hated that part of class with its potential for public humiliation. Not surprisingly at all, I hate math. However, I do remember my times tables.
Miss Larkin made a lasting mark on me and looms large in my psyche. To this day there are times when I'm asked a direct question and I go into deer-in-the-headlights mode and blank out. Most recently, this happened when I was part of a small editing team working on an annual landmine report with my husband, Steve Goose, who created the report and, for its first six years, served as its editor in chief.
Once I'd finish editing a chapter, he'd go over it, peppering me with questions: “How do you know this is correct?” “What's the source of this fact?” “This paragraph actually makes sense to you as it's written? You left it like this?”
At first frustrated and then angry as the questions kept coming, I could sometimes answer them and sometimes not. After all, I wasn't the researcher; I was just helping edit. But Goose's machinelike dissection of the issues and command of the information produced an endless barrage that would send me over the edge. My face would flush and I'd start to sweat.
Suddenly, in the midst of one such editorial inquisition, a vision of Miss Larkin popped into my head. And I started to laugh. Goose wasn't particularly amused when I first explained the comparison. Now when I feel like I'm being harangued with questions on any topic, I give him my fish-eye look of disdain and call him “Miss Larkin.” He doesn't miss the point.
· · ·
During the year of Miss Larkin, a new kid moved to town. Michael was an especially pathetic specimen of gawky grade-school youth. His ears stuck straight out from his head like those of Dumbo the flying elephant, or like Mary Beth's when she was young. The poor kid was also so pale he was nearly translucent, was incredibly skinny, and had no redeeming athletic abilities whatsoever. No one ever wanted to get stuck on a team with Michael during recess. He was the kind of kid who always got picked last.
David, on the other hand, was the blond, blue-eyed stud of Green Street School. He was the biggest, most athletic, smartest boy there. It's likely that every girl in grade school had a crush on him, and maybe even I did too, but that's not why I remember him.
He lorded it over everyone on the playground. Self-appointed king of recess, David was always team captain no matter what the game, and he chose the best players for his own team. He played to win. Not a gracious winner, he was likely an even worse loser. But who'd know? David never lost at anything.
One day, our class was making a large circle in order to play kick ball. As Michael shuffled his way into line, David, with a dash